Ken Spicer’s grandkids were expecting him when they heard the accident. From inside the house it sounded like a car had hit a post. But they knew differently when they heard their grandfather, age 70, cry out for help.

“I was knocked up into the air,” Spicer remembers. “My head hit the windshield, I came down on the hood, and then down onto the pavement.” While biking to his son’s house he’d been hit by a neighbor driving a white Subaru SUV. “The next thing I remember I was lying in both lanes of the street, in the most excruciating pain of my life,” he says. He had traveled all of three blocks.

This kind of accident can, and does, happen anywhere. But if you live where Spicer does, in the Deep South—outside Charleston, South Carolina, in Spicer’s case—this kind of accident is more likely to occur. Much more likely.

According to a benchmark study, released last year by the National Alliance for Biking and Walking, the states of the southern U.S. are the most dangerous per biker, and per bike mile traveled, by a wide margin. If you bike in South Carolina you are 10 times likelier to be hit and killed by a car than if you bike in Oregon, one of America’s safer states for cyclists. In North Carolina, eight times more likely. In Louisiana, seven. If you bike in Mississippi, that number is close to 13.

By the time Ken Spicer arrived at the local medical center, where he is a practicing radiologist, he had lost more than half the blood in his body. As word spread among the physicians that one of their own had been injured, “everyone came down to see me,” he remembers. Then, “all of a sudden, boom, there was nobody there. Like a switch had been thrown.” While he was being treated another car had hit another biker, he learned later, and his trauma team had rushed to resuscitate, in vain, the second injured cyclist of the day. Eventually, Spicer was diagnosed with a spiral fracture of the femur. To reduce the pain from his shredded muscles, pins were inserted into his knee and a sandbag on a pulley hung from them. It was months before he could walk again.

Warm, flat, and scenic, the south should be a bike rider’s dream. But its palm trees and hanging moss stand watch over roadways badly in need of dedicated bike lanes, generous road shoulders, and more navigable urban centers. Beaux Jones, a Louisiana bike advocate, explained that apart from New Orleans, the cities in his state have inherited a structure, “that is somewhat antithetical to biking for pleasure or other purposes.” In contrast with compact cities like San Francisco or Portland, Baton Rouge “is a city that stretches across 35 miles,” he points out. Few choose to bike it.

Melody Moody, the executive director of Bike Walk Mississippi, explains that her state has “a big issue with a lack of paved shoulders. We’ve been working on that for years, but with less success than we would have hoped.”

A report on transportation spending by Advocacy Advance, a partnership between the Alliance for Biking and Walking and the League of American Bicyclists, found that the southern states spend, or plan to spend, the least on biking and walking safety infrastructure as a percentage of their total spending. Over the last few years, Massachusetts directed more than 5 percent of its transportation spending to bicycle and pedestrian facilities. In that same time period Louisiana, North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, South Carolina and Mississippi each devoted one half of one percent.

This lack of investment reflects limited coffers—as well as a limited number of bikers. In South Carolina, “we’ve had the third largest state roadway system, with the third lowest gas tax,” says Amy Johnson, director of the Palmetto Cycling Coalition in South Carolina. As a result, her state has a small budget that has to feed a fat road system hungry for upkeep. State planners are often more likely to view biking as recreation than transportation. “You’re dealing with a mentality that is focused on intrastate travel,” she says. They can be “very resistant to providing funding for construction, reconstruction, or moving lane markings.”

As Moody sees it, the best way to improve cycling conditions in southern states is to increase the number of riders. “We believe in the concept of ‘safety in numbers’ and overwhelmingly believe in the effort to increase ridership as a way to increased safety,” she says. Few would disagree with this conclusion. If drivers don’t expect to see cyclists on the roads, they won’t keep an eye out for them. The statistics in the benchmark study certainly suggest that, on a state-by-state basis, this is true. Eight of the 10 most dangerous states for biking in the U.S. see the fewest bike riders each year. All eight of these are southern. In Alabama, one of the most dangerous cycling states, less than one percent of commutes were performed by bike in 2012.

But there is an obvious catch-22 here. It’s hard to encourage people to ride if the streets aren’t safe. Says Johnson, “You are literally sending them out into harm’s way.”

Cycling enthusiasts in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, can direct visitors to the corner of Lockwood and Montagu, where a white bike with broken tires and a garland of plastic flowers sits chained to a no-parking sign. It marks the spot where Edwin Gardner, a “pillar of the bike community,” was killed by a car three years ago. "Hit and run over and dragged,” remembers Tom Bradford, founder of Charleston Moves, a local biking and walking advocacy group.

The south is rife with stories of prominent cyclists who have been injured or killed. Last year Durham, North Carolina, lost one of its most beloved bikers, Seth Vidal, to a hit and run. The year before, Baton Rouge suffered the same fate. The year before that it was Charleston's turn. In one incident in Arkansas this past summer, 13 cyclists were struck at once in a massive accident that killed one and hospitalized the rest. Reckless driving caused all of these deaths. “Total lawlessness on behalf of drivers,” in the words of Peter Wilborn, founder of the national bike advocacy group and legal practice Bike Law.

How do you increase safety before you increase bikers? Many southern states are rolling out or expanding driver education programs. In North Carolina, representatives from the Department of Transportation say they’ve already seen significant “improved yielding” or road sharing across the Research Triangle as a result of their expanded program, Watch for Me NC.

But Wilborn insists that education alone will never be enough to make the streets safe for bicycles. “Cycling fatalities are inversely proportional to the amount of money spent on bike infrastructure,” he says. “This is well documented. There is a number of what a state spends—and that number correlates almost exactly with its ranking on fatalities.” If you want to know why South Carolina is unsafe, he says, look at how it doesn’t spend its money. Frankly, he adds, “South Carolina does as little as possible.”

Representatives from the South Carolina Department of Transportation safety program can point to a number of initiatives underway to improve safety across the state, for both cyclists and pedestrians. "Bike and pedestrian safety is an essential consideration for all safety projects" in the state, they told me by email. But South Carolina still ranks near the bottom of the list (44th) for allotting money to bike and pedestrian safety, according to review of the benchmark statistics by the Palmetto Cycling Coalition. As investment lags, so will safety.

Despite the danger there is a feeling that things are changing. Or about to change.

In South Carolina at least, a new bike culture is beginning to emerge. In July, 2011 a South Carolina city, Spartanburg, became the first in the region to offer a bike-share program. Within two years, there were seven in the south—10, if you include Texas. In a coup for local advocates, South Carolina’s newest and biggest bridge, the Arthur Ravenel, sports a pristine new bike lane.

And there is growing enthusiasm in other states. “Mississippi takes a lot of flack for how far it hasn’t come yet,” Melody Moody says. But it’s made real progress, and there are plenty of “passionate people in Mississippi who are fighting for change and doing interesting and innovative things,” she says. Others point to new complete streets programs and infrastructure investments in large cities like Atlanta and Charlotte as promising signs, on the municipality level at least.

Nevertheless, cyclists in the region are still struggling to change minds set against “bikes as transportation”—and, more importantly, working to capture real money for safety improvements.

They still have a long road to ride—particularly true if South Carolina is any example. In January the state’s Secretary of Transportation, Robert St. Onge, was kindly asked to tender his resignation—after he'd been arrested at 8 in the morning for drunk driving.

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Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer.

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One of the most commonly taught stories American schoolchildren learn is that of Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s 19th-century tale of a poor, ambitious teenaged boy in New York City who works hard and eventually secures himself a respectable, middle-class life. This “rags to riches” tale embodies one of America’s most sacred narratives: that no matter who you are, what your parents do, or where you grow up, with enough education and hard work, you too can rise the economic ladder.

A body of research has since emerged to challenge this national story, casting the United States not as a meritocracy but as a country where castes are reinforced by factors like the race of one’s childhood neighbors and how unequally income is distributed throughout society. One such study was published in 2014, by a team of economists led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty. After analyzing federal income tax records for millions of Americans, and studying, for the first time, the direct relationship between a child’s earnings and that of their parents, they determined that the chances of a child growing up at the bottom of the national income distribution to ever one day reach the top actually varies greatly by geography. For example, they found that a poor child raised in San Jose, or Salt Lake City, has a much greater chance of reaching the top than a poor child raised in Baltimore, or Charlotte. They couldn’t say exactly why, but they concluded that five correlated factors—segregation, family structure, income inequality, local school quality, and social capital—were likely to make a difference. Their conclusion: America is land of opportunity for some. For others, much less so.

One hundred years ago, a retail giant that shipped millions of products by mail moved swiftly into the brick-and-mortar business, changing it forever. Is that happening again?

Amazon comes to conquer brick-and-mortar retail, not to bury it. In the last two years, the company has opened 11 physical bookstores. This summer, it bought Whole Foods and its 400 grocery locations. And last week, the company announced a partnership with Kohl’s to allow returns at the physical retailer’s stores.

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National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17.

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What the Trump administration has been threatening is not a “preemptive strike.”

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More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

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Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy sparred with Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar on CNN hours after their bill dismantling Obamacare appeared to collapse.

Ordinarily, you debate to stave off defeat. But for Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy on Monday night, the defeat came first.

By the time the two GOP senators stepped on CNN’s stage Monday night for a prime-time debate over their health-care proposal, they knew they had already lost.

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